VDO Meet the Founder Land People Spirit

Bali Hotel Food Rescue Program

Here at Scholars of Sustenance, we see the value in everyone. We want to be a catalyst for positive change, and since our beginnings in 2000, we’ve been driven by the same ideas we initially founded our Non-Profit upon: support, empowerment, and progress. Learn more about our mission, our vision, and how we go about making the changes we want to see.

IT ALL STARTED WITH OUR FOUNDER.

Bo H. Holmgreen

Founder and CEO

I was fortunate to be criss-crossing the world for the last 2 decades, heading up my software company Transoft International, Inc. With an incredible staff, wonderful customers and great matemathical tools, we applied complex software systems at large banks all over the world. Our cash cost optimization techniques were coded into our software product OptiCash. Now I guess we are applying much simpler yet urgent methods to food, so we should have called ourselves OptiFood instead...

During my travels I saw shameful amounts of food wasted, especially at hotel buffets, events, happy hours etc. In my naivety I expected all that surplus food to be put to some good use, but gradually I learned from staff how commercial establishments are challenged allowing such food to go to the needy or let employees take it home. Seeing all that food wasted made our next mission clear: Rescue food in third-world countries where cost and infra-structure allows it.

SOS KICKSTART

Bo H. Holmgreen

Founder and CEO

We started in Bangkok, Thailand, where large tourist hotels compete for efficiency, yet have lots of surplus food. Across the region, we generally see 35% of all food purchased ending up in the landfill. Often down the road from these companies, people have little to eat on a regular basis, making the logistics portion easy once we care enough to do it. We interviewed many people, did our research, reviewed ideas with experts, and verified the basic principles of the intended food rescue.

SOS Global was established in late 2012 and then funded privately. The food rescue charter was approved in 2014 when our non-profit status was established and local foundation paperwork was filed in Thailand. By 2015, our Thai foundation was pioneering these principles in Bangkok and in 2016 we established SOS Indonesia.

I'm very proud on behalf of our wonderful donors, happy recipients and incredibly motivated staffs, to report that we now approach one ton of edible rescued food every single day. That's a LOT of nutrition put to good human use rather than polluting our planet with methane gasses. We calculated recently based on our cost of operations, each rescued meal-equivalent represents a cost of just US$ 0.25. That means that every dollar we invest yields FOUR meals. It also means that every $10 YOU donate will feed 40 people a meal. If you can spare $100, you provide 400 meals, and that's just the beginning... we constantly work to get our costs lower and grow the benefits of both our foundation investments and your donations. We are grateful to all our cash and food donors, to the many partners we enjoy working with, and the hard-working staff motivated by the smiles of our recipient communities - THANK YOU TO ALL!!!